The contracts between the province’s health authorities and 16 for-profit companies detail massive markups for the provision of health-care workers – from nurses to X-ray technologists to occupational therapists – who are now propping up the faltering public system. Sources tell CTV News anywhere from a quarter to nearly all the staff in a hospital operating room or care home ward, for example, are there on a short-term contract.
Many of them have left the public system and union pensions to make much higher hourly rates while retaining the ability to choose when and where to work. The agency hires them as temp workers, taking a big slice of the pie for doing so.
For example, a unionized, health authority worker with a designation as a registered nurse in their first 10 years on the job makes roughly $45 as their base hourly wage. A recent posting from a prominent staffing agency that runs travelnurse.ca posted a week-long request for a surgical nurse in the Lower Mainland offering $52.50 per hour, with “bonus incentives” and unspecified benefits.
allows such companies to charge health authorities $75.62 for that same nurse for each hour they work, as well as any travel expenses for those working more than 50 kilometres from where they live.
Offer this to nurses, and watch them flood back into the regular staffing system.
Our current shortage is an exquisite example of a “free market”, where workers are voting with their feet and accepting a better offer with more attractive terms.
To complain about those better terms sucking away workers is to be deeply hypocritical. Either offer even better terms in response, to make it attractive for nurses to return, or shut TF up and take the current conditions without complaint.
Indeed. Also fix the bizarrely long hours that nurses inexplicably have to work.
Not as much as the residents actually. The longest I’ve ever had to work was 16 hours, but most jobs I’ve worked 12 is the max required in a row. Residents often work 24-72 hour shifts where they can be woken up by a page at any time.
